Han by Eva Tind

Han is the semi-autobiographical account of an adopted woman’s search for her biological roots, as she travels to North Korea to gain an impression of the country of her father’s birth. Her voyage is framed with the cold hard facts presented to her by the North Korean regime, such as a list of guidelines provided by the official tour company, locations the tour guides allow them to visit, the few locals they are permitted to speak to. Yet in the midst of this, the author is distracted by a people who so closely resemble her, yet who are so different, she is drawn to her father’s family village, yet prohibited from travelling there. During these moments of reflection, she speaks directly to the father she never met in poetic and heartfelt appeals, as she attempts to reconcile her biological roots with her social and cultural upbringing.

In assuming the style of reportage, the author effectively takes on the role of a neutral observer, dispassionately recording the tour group’s wild speculations: is any of what they are seeing real, or is it all just one big show, put on especially for them? At the same time, her attempts to connect with her father are beautifully poetic and heart-rending; a father-daughter relationship that never materialised.

Title: Han
Author: Eva Tind
ISBN: 9788702154115
Year of Publication: 2015
Publisher: Gyldendal (Denmark)
Language: Danish
Length: 149 pages
World English Rights Available

Prologue

It could have happened. I could have gone, Father. I could have got to know you as the child you were, after the woman with the round glasses gave birth to you in a village by the Yalu river. Her transparent bridal veil hanging like a wreath, her face revealing: I am getting married. Han, the name you bear as yours. You own nothing, Han, but you are father to someone, you are my biological father. When you die, you leave me the only photo I have from North Korea, a wedding photo, black-and-white, frayed at the edges, as though it had been torn into pieces. The photo is of your parents, a bride and groom, standing side by side with the river roaring behind them. Man and woman, man and river. Halmoni, Grandmother, you look across time through the camera. Your face is a wheel, your mouth a darkly painted flower. Your arms hang by your side like Grandfather’s do, Halaboji, his hair black and shiny. His middle-parting, a white line dividing the black fringe into two silk curtains, fastened with an invisible button by each temple. Halaboji, wearing a black suit with sleeves that are ever so slightly too long, you resemble a large child. Han, we could have discussed it, you and I, discussed them, the wedding picture and that which after several years of invisibility suddenly appears in the picture, shooting up behind grandfather like a shadow, thin as a stalk, a brother with high cheekbones, almond-shaped eyes and with the same, pointed ears as you. Han, your father, my grandfather, Halaboji, dies before his time. You are one year old, like I was one year old, when you separated us. Father and daughter, two continents, two languages, and you pull my first language from my body. Like a magician pulling handkerchiefs from between his lips, from below, from within, that is how you remove the language. The words, the black ants, are no longer mine. The ants are a population with noiseless, active movements, they gather to erect a mound in the middle of the landscape, a mountain in history, in memory, in me. An uncontrolled energy thrives in that mountain. An energy which is expelled from time to time, leaving a white mushroom in the sky, above the earth. Rain falls from that cloud, black as coal, white as fat, cold as the friend who stabs you in the back, a foreshadowing of the annihilation of everything. Han, you see that I must travel. That it must happen. It happens. Here, I am walking up and down the hall. Here, I am opening the letter. I have been granted a visa. I can travel to the country where you were born, but that I cannot visit Sinuiju, the city where you were born. The train leading me out of the country will pass through your hometown. I will pass through the city, that is all. I have to travel with a group in order to enter, and the group has to follow an itinerary. Nobody may enter the country on their own. The travel agency are asking me to write a letter. The letter states that I am a tourist, that I am going to travel with the group, that I will never write about it. I hesitate. I am running down an empty street. I do not stop. I cannot stop. Falling. The snow is falling, the white skin, my body slips, like I’m sliding into a bath. I’m lying weak-kneed, held together only by the clothes I wear. Outside, the hoarse shrieks of the peacock, inside the cold metallic jets of the bath. The sound is a street running from the ear and ending in a den of snow and skin. The snow is a den. The skin is thin, resting inside the den like a window. To fall, to fall inwards, to fall away and to lose the way. To pluck the tail feathers from the peacock and gather the feathers into a fan. To use the fan as a broom and sweep the den’s floor, to shut the room up for winter.

I pack my rucksack, my passport, my clothes, my toothbrush, an extra pair of shoes, cameras, and an iPad without GPS. I stand in front of the mirror, imagining myself walking through the city as though it were mine, as though you were there, Han, a father, I walk as you walked on the street where you were born. There, you turn down another street which intersects the street running south. The winter draws on and birds are thrust across the border.

‘The border is a line drawn on the map using a plastic ruler,’ you say. The border is a line stretched between fence poles in the landscape, the animals hanging on the line like frosted pearls, a white tiger is a woodlouse is a crane is a wild boar is a butterfly is a fly and a fat, silvery fish, so slick that it slips between the claws of the porcelain bears, so big, too big to be hanging on the line, with half of the bear’s body lying in the pale green grass like great, stiff tongues. On one side of the border is Korea, on the other side, Korea, and Korea uses the line as a tightrope. Time comes to a stop here. Han, you are all one people before forces from within and from without decide that the country must be divided in two so that you are able to wage war against yourselves and nobody will ever be able to run towards the south again. Time. Now it shifts. I travel. I travel into the hermetically enclosed nation. To the north.